Friday, June 28, 2013

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well.

If you choose, you may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. I will post and review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Monday, life permitting. To help ensure I recreate your design accurately, please use CARDNAME instead of ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Hey everyone! Sorry I'm running a little late with this. It has become pretty clear that two keywords a week is going to be impossible to keep up with. In the interests of keeping this project moving along at a reasonable pace without drowning under it, I'll be doing the keyword challenges alongside other challenges, which should keep the workload bearable.

I'll discuss the non-keyword challenge first, then we'll talk about which guild is getting keyword suggestions this week.

Cool Card Design of the Day6/26/2013 - The conditional card advantage of Faerie Mechanist and Augur of Bolas is great. It's far from guaranteed, but it is a chance you can optimize when you build your deck, and when it works it feels great. We need more of these. One for each of the common types. Blue shouldn't be getting extra creatures or enchantments. Who should?

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

(This is part of a series of documents that are meant to provide snapshots of each of the guilds. These documents will probably be updated with some regularity. They are meant to provide a starting reference point when developing new cards and ideas for the guilds.)

{G}{W} The Sahleen

The Sahleen are the priest caste of Suvncia. They function as spiritual advisors, teachers, and philosophers. They maintain temples throughout the plane, guiding their members on spiritual enlightenment and serenity.

Alright alright alright alright. Lesson learned. No more than one guild keyword challenge per week. 75 new cards are sitting in the Suvnica file. Let's check out the mechanics we came up with this week, starting with Suvnica's class clowns.

Monday, June 24, 2013

(This is part of a series of documents that are meant to provide snapshots of each of the guilds. These documents will probably be updated with some regularity. They are meant to provide a starting reference point when developing new cards and ideas for the guilds.)

{U}{B} The Rimid

The Rimid are a large clan of vampires completely shunned by the other guilds. The nature of their curse requires that they feed on the thoughts of others, a practice that non-Rimid obviously find threatening and repulsive. Even guilds that don't practice the degrees of insularity ordered by the guildpact do their best to avoid any type of association with the Rimid.

(This is part of a series of documents that are meant to provide snapshots of each of the guilds. These documents will probably be updated with some regularity. They are meant to provide a starting reference point when developing new cards and ideas for the guilds.)

{R}{G} The Grohm Brotherhood

The Grohm are a guild composed of a large number of nomadic families. They travel in small bands throughout Suvnica, sometimes as families, sometimes as comrades. They all have a deep sense of wanderlust, rarely staying in one area for very long. Even the groups frequently disband, as they are not shy about pointing out the things about their companions that drive them up the wall. Still, while they typically have a quick temper, they see little value in deceit and feigning tolerance of annoyances, so intra-guild arguments rarely escalate beyond harsh words and perhaps a fistfight, followed by a reconciliatory beer and an amicable parting of ways.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well.

If you choose, you may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. I will post and review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Monday, life permitting. To help ensure I recreate your design accurately, please use CARDNAME instead of ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

Cool Card Design of the Day6/21/2013 - I don't normally post a CCDD on the same day as the Weekend Art Challenge, but since Wednesday's Chromatic Phoenix was nearly a reprint, I'm sharing the Phoenix that led to it today as a bonus.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

I'm writing this to develop some design discussion that has been going on in the comments of my Suvnica Design Challenge from Yesterday, when we started taking a shot at the first guild keywords. In my introduction to the keyword design challenge, I offered this mechanic for one of the guilds:

(This is part of a series of documents that are meant to provide snapshots of each of the guilds. These documents will probably be updated with some regularity. They are meant to provide a starting reference point when developing new cards and ideas for the guilds.)

{B}{G} The Gilrog

The Gilrog know that, for all the politics and petty grievances that the guildpact fosters, the only true thing of value in this world is power. The guild is primarily focused on growth above all else. The biggest creatures are the most powerful. The holder of the most resources is the most powerful. Power isn't taken or exercized; it's built.

Cool Card Design of the Day6/20/2013 - I was thinking about mechanics that could combo with Scrap without being parasitic. Barter technically fulfills that goal, but I expect that it's not strong enough in its current form to be playable with more than a handful of other cards from older sets (among which Puppet Conjurer is by far my favorite). Even so, it's not a terrible idea to start from.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Cool Card Design of the Day6/19/2013 - While searching Deviant Art for another phoenix design, I found this colorful illustration. It's not as bad-ass as Magic's other phoenixes, but it was begging to have {W}{U}{B}{R}{G} somewhere on the card and I wanted to find out where.

I quickly settled on this being a mono-red card that you could resurrect with all five colors, but I kept feeling like it wanted to come back bigger when you did that. Sunburst later and we've got Chromatic Phoenix:

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Hey everybody. This week, we're starting Stage 3 of Suvnica design. We have working creative identities for each of the guilds, now it's time to really start pinning down the mechanical. I know a lot of you have been eager to start coming up with guild keywords, and this week we're doing that for the Zhavi and the Tezzi guilds.

(This is part of a series of documents that are meant to provide snapshots of each of the guilds. These documents will probably be updated with some regularity. They are meant to provide a starting reference point when developing new cards and ideas for the guilds.)

{U}{R} The Tezzi

The Tezzi are primarily entertainers of various sorts. They are musicians, acrobats, and actors, as well as poets, playwrights, and philosophers. They also are the home to most of Suvnica's intellectual anarchists, believing the pact that governs their lives to be inherently evil. They revel in minor breaches of the rules and ordinances, never passing an opportunity to play an embarrassing trick on the stoic Zhavi, brutish Radkar, and sycophantic Gilrog.

(This is part of a series of documents that are meant to provide snapshots of each of the guilds. These documents will probably be updated with some regularity. They are meant to provide a starting reference point when developing new cards and ideas for the guilds.)

{W}{B} The Zhavi Council

The Zhavi function as the governing agency of the guildpact, ensuring compliance and punishing transgressions. They do little in the way of legislating, although they oversee the court system of Suvnica. As the enforcers of the guildpact, they are seen as being the highest ranked of the guilds, and are the most strict about adherence to its requirements within the guild. Without exception, every member of the Zhavi is born that way. No one is able to join, or even serve any function other than as menial labor within the Zhavi's territories.

Cool Card Design of the Day6/18/2013 - Bridge to Anywhere is based on the Ridgeview Copse cycle. Instead of putting a land on top of your library, you're trading a card from your hand for it. That could let you ship away a spell that's still too expensive or another land that simply isn't the one that you want now.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Things are really coming together for early stage Suvnica design. Over the weekend I went through the survey data and creative visions to date. As of this post, I'm locking in the guild identities (unless we find them completely unworkable as we further develop the block). So without further ado, here's Suvnica:

This week's challenge involved providing some ideas for mana fixer cycles, something that Ravnica knocked out of the park the first time around. Everyone put out some pretty solid efforts. I'm grouping the submissions into common lands, rare lands, and artifacts. I also renamed most of the submissions so a) they weren't all WU fixers, and B) to show off the new names we'll be using to refer to each of the guilds (more on that in an upcoming article). So without further ado, let's check out this week's submissions.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well.

If you choose, you may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. I will post and review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Monday, life permitting. To help ensure I recreate your design accurately, please use CARDNAME instead of ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Cool Card Design of the Day6/13/2013 - I'm driving to Origins as you read this, but I scheduled this ahead of time for your viewing pleasure. The thing I'm most conflicted about in this design is the inclusion of the phrase "at the beginning of your next main phase." It makes the card so much easier to use fully, but very likely too easy. It's not like it's a bad card without it.

OK. So we have proposed visions for all of the guilds. We have proposed visions for what Suvnica, as a plane, should look like. Over the next week, I'm going to be working to tie it all together, so we have a final cohesive vision that is going to start informing our designs from here on out.

Unfortunately, I've fallen a little behind in my bar-prep studies, and that kind of has to take priority over this, so I'm pretty much taking this week off. I'll be back next Monday with the final Suvnica visions and a new challenge. Before I settle on the final creative identities of the world and guilds, I'd like some participant feedback as far as what visions you all are most interested in developing. Please check out this poll and rank your interest in each of the proposed guild visions. The vision with the highest rank isn't guaranteed to be the final one, but having a higher rank will definitely influence my choice.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Cool Card Design of the Day6/12/2013 - Book Burning seems like an appropriate counterpoint to yesterday's CCDD. It probably needs to cost more than one mana, but I wouldn't deign to guess how much without playtesting. It might work at one mana, if you replace "end step" with "upkeep step."

Ravnica had the tagline, "City of Guilds." At this point we're trying to figure out what Suvnica's "[Noun] of [Noun describing a group]" tagline should be. Here's the worlds everyone offered that we can play with:

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Cool Card Design of the Day6/11/2013 - I was tempted to make Personal Interest a colorless artifact so anyone could play with it, but it kind of feels like messing with time and knowledge and that's very blue. Plus the pun name just wouldn't have worked.

Here we are. The last of our guild revisions. One of the things that inspired me to start the Suvnica project in the first place was this weekend art challenge. I designed an Izzet artifact and thought it would be cool to fill out a cycle of artifacts for the guilds in DGM, and the concept I came up with initially for Simic was very {G}{U} but not at all consistent with Simic's flavor. That initially got me thinking about guilds with different creative identities, and over 230 cards later, here we are. So let's rethink what it means to be a Simic on Suvnica.

Friday, June 7, 2013

Hey guys! The week 6 exercise has already been posted, in case you missed it.

I don't know if I told you this, but following the week 5 submissions, we had collectively designed, and this figure excludes reprints and preprints, over 230 cards. That means we had designed more cards than see print for a typical large set. The rarity and color distribution for a multicolor set looked about right too. I'm super impressed.

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well.

If you choose, you may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. I will post and review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Monday, life permitting. To help ensure I recreate your design accurately, please use CARDNAME instead of ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Cool Card Design of the Day6/6/2013 - In the realm of Unsummon and Boomerang, where you're severing another planeswalkers tether to something she's summoned, what if you could also replace the memory/idea of that something in their mind? Curiosity's Call borrows from Vendilion Clique to make that happen.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Cool Card Design of the Day6/5/2013 - In the same way that blue uses looting and scrying to improve card quality without explicit card advantage, green can use effects like Mwonvuli Beast Tracker and Grisly Salvage to give you lands or creatures as you need them. Verdant Explorer is Borderland Ranger without the extra cardboard.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Listen, child.
This wasn't always home. A few seasons ago, we didn't even know this place existed. If we had, we wouldn't have cared.

The place where we lived, it was incredible. I can’t even explain it to you. You don’t have the context to even understand what it would be I was describing. Buildings that were ten times the size of our shelters were commonplace. The gardens, beautifully manicured and flourishing with blooms that humble the imagination. And the cathedrals… I was never particularly invested in the Syndicate, neither figuratively nor literally, but standing in the shadow of one of the cathedrals never failed to halt my breath for a moment.

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We met as competitors and collaborators in the second Great Designer Search. After the contest was over, we decided we still had things to say about designing Magic: the Gathering. So we started a blog.